Forgetting and Vibes
What I read: You'll forget most of what you learn. What should you do about that? by Adam Mastroianni. Published July 12, 2022.
If you’re like me, periodically you struggle to remember a name, fact, or tidbit of information you were sure was on the tip of your tongue. But no. We all forget. I can’t remember any of the details of high school physics even though I aced the class. In the 1980s, I attended a week-long training on a software application and got certified as an expert, but today I’d be hard pressed to operate that software let alone install or configure it.
Almost all of us start going to school when we’re three or four, and we don’t stop until we’re somewhere between 18 and 22. Some of us, having nothing better to do, keep going to school long into our twenties and beyond.
And yet, invariably, most of what we learn vanishes. We keep a few things: multiplication, spelling, “Columbus sailed the ocean blue in fourteen-hundred and ninety-two.” But if we had to retake the exams, we’d flunk.
I’m sure we all share this forgetting experience. There have been studies that look at the rate at which we forget stuff. In studies that examine how much we forget over longer spans of time, we can lose between 14% and 85% of our knowledge in just a few years. How much we forget depends on many factors, but it’s clear we all forget much of what we once knew.
Maybe this is why the companies I’ve worked for required us to take certain trainings every year or two, even if we took them annually for the past 10 or 20 years. They likely knew we all forget things. The important stuff has to be continually repeated and reinforced.
This is also why one of the established learning strategies, repetition, makes so much sense. We have to encode new information over and over if it’s going to stick. That’s why most of us can still add and multiply numbers despite having learned that in our youth. We use addition and multiplication often, sometimes daily. So, it sticks.
I’ve often said the best skill set that my early schooling, and especially the academic coaching from my father, taught me is the ability to learn. So this rang true.
It doesn’t matter how much students remember because what we’re really doing is teaching them how to learn.
I could never count the number of times I’ve had to look up facts, usage of a feature in software, quotations I formerly had on the tip of my tongue, or the steps in a business process even though I’ve done the process a dozen times. These are things I knew and knew well. Yet, gone. Well, not entirely gone.
One of the most important aspects of learning about something is that once you forget the specifics of it, you at least know how to go about finding that information again.
There is a lot of research that clearly outlines how people learn best. However, Adam Mastroianni has a unique take on learning that upon reflection I like.
I think they all miss something big because they assume that learning is about acquiring knowledge or skills. That sounds reasonable, but it’s wrong.
I’m here to tell you that learning is all about vibes.
Yes, vibes. I know. It sounds a bit ethereal and vague. But I think Mastroianni is on to something. I don’t remember lots of facts and detailed information, but I sure remember how I felt when something occurred. This aligns with the often-misattributed quote Mastroianni mentions.
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
I’ve said much the same many times. Watch any good teacher, speaker, advocate, politician, or anyone trying to move an audience of one or thousands. We rarely remember exactly what they said, but we sure remember how we felt when they said it.
Mastroianni contends that remembering how we feel is a universal that applies to everything.
We don’t remember things like our phone number from 30 years ago or how to play “Our Lady of Spain” on guitar that we were so good at in our teens. But we do remember how we felt when we chatted with our best friend in high school or that time we screwed up during a sports team’s big competition.
Facts disappear, or at least fade into the background. Feelings stay with us. Mastroianni uses the word feelings to describe what we remember, but he means feelings in a certain way, what he calls vibes.
That’s what I mean by a feeling. A combination of emotions, aesthetics, meaning, and values. And when you layer feelings on top of each other, you get a vibe. (It’s a silly word, but it’s the only one that fits.)
There’s not a lot of research to back up the importance of vibes. Vibes don’t fit neatly into the memory org chart. Vibes seem to be part episodic memory and part implicit memory. This is the crux of why Mastroianni thinks honoring vibes in learning is so important.
If we’re on the right track here, the picture looks something like this:
1. Knowledge fades fast, especially when you don’t use it. In the words of the late, great psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, “All sorts of ideas, if left to themselves, are gradually forgotten”
2. Feelings, or vibes, on the other hand, seem to stick around a lot longer.
If true, this seems pretty important to anybody who hopes to teach or learn anything. Almost all of education centers around knowledge and skills rather than vibes
I remember my school days when I would cram for exams and do well. When I was quite young my dad, an esteemed academic, sat me down and taught me how to take tests. It’s a skill. I did extremely well on most tests I took. Do I remember what I learned for those tests. Not much. So much of academia is focused on tests and other proofs that we learned and not so much on solidifying what we learn and certainly not tossing the stuff around so we get a deeper sense of it, dare I say its vibes.
So, Mastroianni suggests we focus less on facts and more on vibes.
It may be disappointing that the human brain loses knowledge so fast, but it’s a miracle that it keeps vibes so long. Vibes may sound flimsy, ethereal, and useless, but in fact they’re far more powerful than a pile of facts or a couple of skills.
We can be presented with common problems to solve, as in the saving for retirement example used in the article. But facts and details we can easily look up online. I don’t need to remember the set of keystrokes that inserts a formula into a spreadsheet cell. I can look that up. But it’s recognizing the set of circumstances and the solution patterns that are important. I’ll label those vibes. It’s as good a word as any.
So what might look like a simple plug-and-chug situation is, in fact, a whole tangle of problems to solve. Untangling them requires some knowledge, yes, but knowledge is cheap and easily acquired. What you really need is curiosity, self-efficacy, perseverance, perspective, and hope. And those are vibes.
The rest of the article examines the writer’s concept of vibes in more depth. It points to something I’ve said many times about the learning process. It’s messy. It’s imprecise. It’s sometimes random. It’s done in slow and fast spurts. It’s something we figure out for ourselves and our learning process is probably not exactly alike anyone else’s.
Mastroianni makes a case for embracing the vibes concept in the classroom or other learning settings. Teachers and students might not be on a journey to acquire a set of facts or skills, but rather to learn their character, embracing the vibes so that we learn better and function optimally for the rest of our lives.
But if you care about vibes, going to class looks very different, as does everything else about education. Class is a place where you can pick up vibes like “learning is important” and “even amateurs can contribute useful knowledge” and “people who make good points and aren’t assholes about it are respected.” Enthusiastic professors can give you the vibe of “there’s so much we don’t know, and it’s fun to figure it out.” Your classmates can give you vibes like, “you learn a lot more when you’re not surrounded by the same kind of person all the time.” Even the buildings can emanate a vibe of “teaching and learning are ancient, sacred traditions.”
This article presents an idea that doesn’t immediately land inside my brain as settled fact or established theory. Yet, the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. Knowing how we learn best is one of my main areas of interest and this idea of vibes would envelop just about everything else we know about learning. It’s a big idea. I’m going to think about it more. But for now, I think it’s certainly a sound concept to ponder.
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